The Knight Leader tried to get away, but the cyclonite blasts had caused the entire maintenance tunnel to collapse and cave in. The grenade erupted with concussive force and knocked him into the crumbling pile of rocks that had trapped him. Kay-El felt like he had been hit by a monstrous running tackle, the blast had smashed his solar plexus into his chest plate and now he was doubled over in stinging weakness, and his diaphragm spasmed, causing him to gasp and choke like his whole chest had been paralyzed.
“Kiyaah!” a rogue dropped down immediately after the blast to make the most of the advantage. Black veins lined his arms as his spirits pumped him full of strength dopers, augmenting his attacks by stringing lithiated contraction gryph-fibers through his biceps and forearm flexors, not to mention a good old helping of raw adrenaline. He swung a great sledgehammer – enough concussive force to break elvan gryphantene laced bone even through the protective shell of carapace – at the Knight Leader, and Kay was only barely able to lift his greatsword, stabbing it into the ground to help absorb the force, to deflect the blow away.
CLANG! Krr…
It knocked the blade so hard that it added three centimeters to the gash he had sunk into the ground to brace.
Consistent parrying was out of the question, he would have to use these cramped quarters to his advantage. Knight Leader immediately squared his stance and held his greatsword to his face, lifting it parallel to the floor, for a lunging stab. But timing was crucial. He skulked and paced, circling low.
mirrorImage(copies: 3);
The rogue now saw the shadowy figure of the Knight Leader, poised to pounce and plunge his blade into his chest, split into double. Then each double split again, so there were four.
“DIE!”
The rogue brought his sledgehammer down to whack-a-mole and smashed- the wrong Knight Leader. Oh, too bad. Try again?
With a single strafe, the Knight Leader shoved his sword up through the rogue’s gut, slicing through the core of his chest, until the blade shot out through his mouth. Nope.
“Gahk… gahk…”
With one foot, the Knight Leader kicked the corpse off his blade and with a single boosted jump, shot straight up to cling onto the ledge of the open trapdoor.
The rest of the psions had fled the control room, leaving the only other soldier there to face him now. This soldier had wisely chosen to camp the way into the control room and so he unloaded all the rounds of his final remaining high-capacity magazine.
“BURN IN HELL!!”
The shots passed harmlessly through the illusion! “What-” the rogue held his fire now, certain that this was a hallucination. But how? Soldiers can’t use psionics.
The Knight Leader had smartly sent a Mirror Image up first. And the brief moment of confusion was all he needed.
blur();
Assist? The Mirror Image became a wraith, and Vi tweaked – fear(target: gunner); – the hallucination to appear a rampaging revenant, sending it directly at the rogue gunner.
“AIEEEEE!!!” The rogue shot blindly in all directions as the apparition engulfed him, his aim completely off with sudden twitching spasms of fright.
Now the Knight Leader really did pull himself up, but as he did so, a stray wild shot glanced off his helmet and knocked his neck forward painfully. His helmet was ringing like a gong. He shook the disorientation off. He turned – he had left his greatsword below for it was too unwieldy to carry with him – and the wrist stilettos in his new rogue carapace popped out with a ‘snikt’. He leapt forward and plunged them both into the neck of the bewildered gunner, who collapsed with a bloody drowning choke.
Regroup! Form under me!
Second, Ninth, and Tenth, having successfully pushed off the stream of incoming knights from the barracks located just behind the gatehouse, burst into the control room to join the Knight Leader.
Go! Go! Go!
Tenth tossed the spare rifle he was carrying to Kay-El. They spread out and took different bits of cover along the blasted down back wall of the eastern gatehouse, now crumbling to bits. From here they could see swarms of rogue knights rushing out from the distance, running out willy-nilly from the four bunker hatches situated just behind the four gatehouses.
Suicide Squad, that was the nickname that the Amallarkean Legions were giving them. That, well, Amefrid had given them.
Vi, give me a wallhack, Third thought.
Mal? You got this? So Malevolent traced out the form of one of the rogue knights, holding behind some corner cover, for Third to aim at. The depleted uranium rod soared, melting through the material carapace included, to penetrate through the knight, shredding his spinal column. And he thought he was safe!
They had the east.
Vilithe could sense now that the attack from all four sides was progressing rapidly.
From the north, one of the Assassins had psionically stealthed her way up to the watchtower across from Third, providing two vectors of railgun sniper fire to cover the rush of Amallarkean elite knights pushing through from the way across.
From the south, two vassal reavers had clumsily managed to lurch through, avoiding flak cannon fire – one good hit could take down a drake, much less a reaver – and the flank of vassal knight reinforcements had formed with Kay-El, and Kay-El had now taken psionic command of all three reavers worth of vassals to command a death platoon of twenty three vassal knights.
From the west, Serun had pushed directly through the entry corridor, his elite carapace and pure gryphantene tower shield holding off a continuous stream of gunfire for his column behind him, while the other assassin had psionically hacked the rogue turrets to fire upon those they were originally meant to defend. The remaining rogue knights that had emerged from the quadruple barracks bunkers all rushed into the central keep which, on the surface, appeared to be nothing but a short, flat disc. A blast shield to protect the underground building.
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Vilithe reached deep into the earth with her mind and tried to sense what was present underneath…
Most of the rogues – the bulk of them recently freed, and which usually took a lot of time to fully unwind their imprinting – and those who were not combat ready, labor workers and mating drones, had fled to the deepest layer of the underground central keep and were barely psionically perceptible. It was labyrinthine in the lowest depths, and the mission was not to plumb them.
Instead, right in the very heart of the keep, halfway to the bottom, was a panic room. It had walls five meters thick, and only one way in or out - from the top. Amefrid’s gambit was to trap Exasha inside where she could not escape. But doing so would require utmost haste.
The gatehouses led to deeper tunnels still that led into the heart of the keep, the keep was impossible to access from the ground. However, the blast shield disk bunker had slats from which gunners could easily fire, so while the surge of Clan Amallark’s forces had given them overall control over the aboveground battlefield, it was not going to hold for long.
The top levels of the keep, barracks bunkers, and gatehouses were crawling with rogue knights. The rogue knights outnumbered the Amallarkean knights by three to one, and they were supported by plenty of unarmored soldiers and assorted arsenal within the keep. Some of the rogue knights ran back into their barracks bunker entrances to hold from there, others rushed to push the advancers away from the gatehouses. Crossfire and the loud bangs of grenades splintered across in chaotic cacophony. Now the fight had concentrated to three gatehouse bottlenecks – Third and the Amallarkean Assassin Sniper held the north entrance with their railguns to cut off escape, assisted by Mal’s wallhacks – the heavy assault from the west, the flanking assault from the east, and the supporting assault from the south
Kay-El, Second, Ninth and Tenth now assumed the diamond wolfpack formation. As they fired and advanced down the long staircase down from the eastern gatehouse into the keep, while another four vassals took the south, slowly, and the remaining fifteen fought off rogue knights attempting to retake the southern and eastern gatehouses. Vilithe couldn’t scry what was going on in the western gatehouse.
A rocket streaked towards the wolfpack. Get away! The Knight Leader swung back, pushed Second to the wall, while Tenth, who was in the back, turned tail and ran up the stairs. He didn’t make it very far before he was knocked to his knees for Ninth, who dove to the wrong side, ate the rocket square in the chest. Not even carapace could protect him as he was ripped apart to bloody chunks. Kay-El was blasted hard once again onto his heavily bruised abdomen, but now he had learned how to block his own pain, without the need of shouldering it upon a psion.
lesserPainBlock();
It was limited in potency however, and Kay-El still had to grit his teeth to suppress the throbbing, radiating burn of black and purple broken blood vessels all upon his sternum and upper gut.
A vassal knight who was not of Kay-El’s original squad now descended to fill up the rank.
CHARGE! Vilithe and Mal amplified Kay-El’s psionic command, as they had rehearsed.
They rushed down as the rocket rogue was busy dropping another munition into his launcher. Kay-El let rip a burst of fire. One round struck Rocket Rogue’s jaw and blew it half off, another round struck his shoulder, and finally the third round struck the rocket he was loading itself and he was killed instantly, incinerated by the fireball.
Further behind him was a barricade, lined with rogues – mostly soldiers, but some workers – all wielding bullpup combustion rifles. Once the flash and smoke of the ruptured rocket lifted, they blanketed the entry into the main keep tunnel with rounds.
mirrorImage(
target: self,
copies: 1
);
mirrorImage(
target: Second,
copies: 1
);
The lone rogue assassin among the row of rogue infantry – the rest soldiers or just workers – could scry that easily, so psionically obvious was the command.
The ghostly mirror images of Kay-El and Second, augmented by Vilithe and Mal working together with physics simulations to appear more convincing, split to the sides to draw the fire of the rogues, doubt creeping upon them but they dared not stop shooting, then they were struck by dawning realization that they had fallen into a trap when the real Kay-El and Second rushed down to the center and, with a few quick bursts, cut the entire row of rogues down with well-placed shots to the shoulders, necks, upper chests, and heads.
The bone would ping and bounce around about inside the shell until it snapped at an odd angle against the exoskeletal frame.
Vilithe was so impressed.
He was starting to think these weirdly gleeful quips in the middle of fighting. It both unnerved and greatly entertained Vilithe. She chalked it up to his own way of managing combat stress. Malevolent thought it was lame. Who did he think he was? Peter Parker?
Elphas Bezoth.
Big brain move, right there, thought Vilithe. Oh, now you’re just getting impressed by anything, thought Mal.
Sup, bub?
In the pouncing style of Ezio Auditore of Florence, a move studied once in the muddy memories of Kay-El, who was slowly reclaiming them.
Vyrion Du Pont
Missing someone?
Define success. Pyrrhic victory? Eleventh had been hit with a mind blast and gone down, and they couldn’t help him anymore at that point and retreated without him, and currently his face was getting melted off by a psion’s necrotic touch. His name was Billy Boucher.
Nesterin Gates-Buffett
His name was Auni Boucher. The redaction dissipated immediately upon death. Rest in peace, Auni, thought Malevolent. Goodbye, Auni, thought Vilithe. They felt sad. But now was no time for mourning.
Crap polymer carapace, not the primo gryph-plate, but even that wouldn’t have helped much. Replace dismemberment with severe internal bleeding- still dying, after all.
Woah he’s going for something really hard here. It’s not gonna help much.
Tanyl Talauth.
An Aryssal manufactured Amallarkean clone of the Steyr Aug.
Her name was Maeral Gates-Buffett. Clan Gates-Buffett, like Clans Bezoth, Saud, Rothschild, Phagebrin, Adanbani, Zilis, and Wilson were the so-called ‘Refugee Clans’, who had most of their holdings on Reath, but some survivors had managed to flee Aryss. When they arrived, they had come to the Triumvirate’s territory - Clans Amallark, Talauth, and Boucher. And then there were the conquered clans- the Clans Du Pont, Bettencourt, Boehringer, Ortega, Li-Kawok, Mars, Walton, Wallenberg, Slim, and Chan-Zuck. Not a single elvan of the conquered clans made it off Reath, fully vanquished by the Imperium, their last broods either given the Goddess’s Pardon to roam as rogue traders, or made Reathean vassals.
It features a highly realistic physics engine.
Maeral Gates-Buffett, Adarat Adanbani, Elephon and Erlathan Dupont, Laeroth Rothschild, Llewel Bezoth, Uevareth Zilis, Sanev Saud, and Alen Phagebrin.